by Paula Daly
‘Does this bother you?’ he whispered, leaning in close, gesturing to Petra, who was now in the full throes of explaining to Nadine how men get around the Child Support Agency. Nadine’s brow was knitted in concern as Petra told her of numerous fathers from school who’d fled and were out of work, meaning their wives and families received pretty much zilch in the way of support payments.
‘Not really,’ I told Scott. ‘It’s hardly a secret. I just don’t think everyone wants to hear about it on a night out. That’s why I try to shut her up. A losing battle, as you can see.’
Again, he held my gaze, and I felt something shift inside.
I looked away.
Alarm bells went off in my head. Married men were off limits, simple as that. I rose, asking if anyone wanted nibbles, as I was going inside. I told Petra I’d check on the kids while I was at it, but she was in the zone, lecturing poor Nadine on how the system was skewed against women, because, ‘You can’t up and leave your own kids like men, can you? Your biology won’t let you.’
I went upstairs, paid a quick visit to the loo and listened outside Clara’s bedroom for a moment. Vince had put the kids to bed earlier, telling ghost stories (his speciality) about the Grey Lady and the Headless Horseman, old favourites he probably frightened little girls with back when he was a child himself.
I pushed the door open a fraction. The kids were still up – Clara, George and the two little girls from next door whose names escaped me. One was a dozy-looking child with a permanently wet lower lip who hung on Clara’s every word. They were sitting in a circle, beneath a cotton sheet, with a torch.
I pushed open the door fully. ‘Time to get to sleep, kids,’ I said softly, and there was the silent movement of little bodies from beneath the sheet as they climbed inside their beds.
‘Goodnight,’ I whispered.
I headed downstairs, grabbed the throws and went outside with a family pack of salt-and-vinegar Chipsticks, taking my place by the gas heater. Petra was laughing at something, trying to stand, but she couldn’t get out of her chair, so she sank down again, beaten.
‘You okay there, Roz?’ Scott asked.
‘Long day,’ I replied, trying to make my eyes match my smile. I’d been thinking about the bailiffs and my empty house.
Petra was now ranting about Winston’s cheating, asking the small crowd why anyone would want to cheat on someone as lovely as her sister.
She tipped her glass my way, in case anyone had forgotten who I was, and I found myself saying, without really thinking, ‘Do you know, a person once told me they wished Winston had visited a prostitute instead of having affairs?’
Someone coughed.
‘What?’ said Petra.
‘A prostitute,’ I repeated. ‘I suppose it would have been a hell of lot less hassle in the long run,’ I added absently.
There was a stunned silence. Everyone turned to me and stared.
Petra put her drink down. ‘Jesus Christ, Roz,’ she said.
I glanced around, and I could see by the look of confusion and awkwardness on each face that this was not a commonly held belief. The women seemed affronted, and the men didn’t know where to look.
‘It does go on,’ I said, trying to justify what I’d just said.
At this Nadine leaned forward in her seat. Her expression changed to one of genuine inquiry, as though she was open-minded and wanted to know more. ‘What makes you say that?’ she said, blinking a little. ‘Do you know people who frequent them?’
‘Crikey, no,’ I said. ‘Of course not. It’s just that after Winston’s affairs were made public, one poor guy – Giles was his name – whose family had broken up on account of Winston carrying on with his wife, said to me, “Wouldn’t it have just been easier if Winston had used a professional?”’
Petra began to panic. What was I doing talking like this in front of her nice guests?
‘And, in that moment, I could sort of see his point,’ I said. ‘If Winston had taken himself off, instead of sleeping with half the women around here – women who were married, women who had families – then there wouldn’t be all those broken homes as a result.’
Petra gasped. ‘I can’t believe you’re seriously—’
‘Oh, Petra,’ I said, sighing. ‘I’m not being serious.’
‘You sound very serious.’
‘I’m not. But, honestly, you don’t know what it was like to have those poor bereft men glaring at you like it’s your fault. Like, if I’d kept better tabs on Winston, then he wouldn’t have jumped into bed with their wives. I’m only saying that if Winston had filled up whatever need he felt needed filling without wrecking everyone’s lives in the process, I’d probably have more respect for him.’
‘Good God,’ said Petra standing up. ‘Why did he need to do it at all, Roz? I can’t believe you’re justifying it.’
‘I’m not justifying it.’
‘Don’t look at me,’ Vince cut in. He was holding up his palms in innocence. ‘I get all the excitement I need right here.’
Petra was dismayed. She raised her hands above her head as though to ward off a blow.
She looked from me to Scott, to Nadine, to Vince.
I had ruined the evening.
I had ruined everything.
Her eyes pricked with tears before she rose and hurryied off inside the house.
5
CLOTHING COVERS A multitude of sins.
You’ve probably already figured out that real people don’t resemble the airbrushed, Photoshopped images you see in the media. I read a smashing quote from Cindy Crawford recently who, upon being asked how she felt about those images, replied, ‘I wish I looked like Cindy Crawford.’
God love her for that. Because you wouldn’t believe the amount of people (men included) who apologize for the state of their bodies when removing their clothes.
Consider the following a public-service announcement.
I have treated a grand total of two skinny women in my twenty years of practice who have naturally big boobs. I have treated (at the last reckoning, anyway) zero patients over forty-five years of age who don’t sag somewhere. Even the desperately thin ones. You get them to turn over and their skin falls away from their bodies in the most remarkable way.
Beautifully curved ladies are criss-crossed with Caesarean scars, with striations of stretch marks, with indentations as if they were still wearing an underwired bra. Bodybuilding men have purple, keloid-scarred, acned backs and give off apeculiar smell from steroid use. Elderly, wiry, super-fit fell runners often have bulging varicose veins like small bunches of grapes on their calves and have flaps of surplus skin around their upper arms and ribcages.
Voluptuous young women can be covered in black hair all the way from their navel to their knees, courtesy of the cruel polycystic-ovary syndrome.
There are botched tattoos, missing toes, missing slabs of muscle, missing breasts.
This is the human body.
It does not look like it does in the movies. But that doesn’t make it any less wondrous, any less perfectly suited to doing everything you ask of it. Given the chance, the body will fix itself. Given rest and some TLC, it will recover, generate new tissues, even new nerve pathways. It is constantly aiming to return to a state of balance, a state of equilibrium. And if it can’t? That’s where I come in.
Physiotherapy is the treatment of the body through physical means. If the body is out of balance, I lay my hands on it to initiate the healing process. No drugs. I should point out, however, that this is not an exact science – no area of medicine is. You try one thing, and it either works or it doesn’t.
There was a sign hung in my treatment room that read: ‘I AM NOT JESUS.’ Though sometimes I wondered exactly what his hit rate was. I mean, did he cure everyone he came into contact with? I suspected not. I suspected he couldn’t have done much to help my next patient of the day – one of my failures. I couldn’t improve her symptoms, whatever I tried.
During the first c
onsultation Rosemary Johns greeted me with the news that she had been to every single therapist in the area and no one could get her right. Now this sort of opening would usually lead one of two ways. Either I examined the patient and became quite giddy upon spotting the veiled symptom I knew the other clinicians had missed, or my heart sank because the patient was one of those people who just didn’t want to get better.
With Rosemary it was the latter.
(Off topic, but patients such as this just won’t die either. When I worked in the NHS I’d read the initials CTD in the margin of a patient’s notes with a queasy kind of dread – Circling the Drain. They could be in hospital for years.)
Anyway, my state of mind was not what you’d call free and easy when I called out for Rosemary Johns on Monday morning. The weekend had been hellish. Petra was barely speaking to me after I had humiliated her beyond forgiveness on Friday night, she was so distressed about the impression I’d made on Scott and Nadine. Unbeknownst to her, however, Vince had dropped by my house on Saturday, slipping me a fifty and depositing two old armchairs, a nest of tables and a cooker with a decade’s worth of grease on it.
His friend had pulled the unwanted furniture out of a house clearance over near Rydal Water, and Vince rightly thought I could make use of it until I got back on my feet. I spent most of Sunday applying for another batch of credit cards, hoping the over inflated earnings I’d claimed to bring in would not be checked out too closely so that I could replace some of the furniture the bailiffs had removed. I’d have to wait a week to find out if I’d been approved.
So this morning it was hard to hide my surprise and, I suppose, my relief, when Rosemary Johns’s mournful face did not appear at my treatment-room door, but rather, Scott Elias.
‘I hope you don’t mind,’ he said. ‘I called for an appointment earlier and they told me they had this cancellation. Were you hoping for a break?’
‘A break?’ I said, momentarily confused. ‘Oh, no, I don’t really get breaks. Wayne fills the cancellations with patients from the waiting list. I’m surprised to see you here, though. You must have jumped the queue.’
Scott went sheepish. ‘I might have offered a little sweetener.’
I smiled. ‘I won’t ask. Anyway, come on in. What can I do for you?’
‘My elbow? Remember?’
I nodded. ‘Have a seat, and I’ll get your details down. Then I’ll take a look.’
I busied myself as he took out his phone and car keys and placed them on the desk. I didn’t comment on the Ferrari fob, but I must admit it did stir my interest.
Here’s something worth knowing about rich people, though, should you feel inclined to hang around them:
They don’t give you any of their money.
They pay no more for your services than any other punter, and the likelihood of them leaving you anything in their will is next to zero. I gave up thinking they were anything other than another patient years ago, because, as a rule, they were generally more hassle to treat. They expected their wealth to guarantee they would be seen fast but lost no sleep over missing appointments once they were back on the mend.
I jotted down Scott Elias’s details, his past medical history, the particulars of his injury, and asked him about his job – he owned a large electronics manufacturing firm near Preston. Then I told him to remove his shirt and asked him exactly where the pain was.
‘Does this hurt?’ I said, knowing full well it did, as I could feel some thickening on the point of attachment of the extensor tendon. I asked just to break the silence.
‘Yes,’ he replied, ‘how did you know where to press?’
‘Sixth sense.’
‘Do you think you can do anything for it?’
‘It’s easy to treat,’ I said casually. ‘Shouldn’t take long.’
‘What will you do?’
‘I’ll use a complicated medical procedure,’ I began, and he raised his eyebrows expectantly. ‘First, I shall rub it like this. And then like that.’
‘That’s it?’
‘That’s it.’
‘Okay,’ he said, but he didn’t seem convinced.
I spent the next few minutes breaking down the scar tissue that had formed around the tendon. As far as treatments go, this was a pretty mindless task, requiring negligible amounts of concentration. Over the years my thumbs had become attuned to the slightest changes, moving intuitively from healthy areas to damaged tissue without any real conscious thought on my part.
‘I told your receptionist we could go for a drive in the Ferrari if he slotted me in today,’ Scott admitted.
‘Wayne?’ I said, amused. ‘Don’t call him a receptionist. He won’t thank you for it. On second thoughts,’ I said, feeling mischievous, ‘make sure you call him exactly that.’
‘You don’t like him?’
‘I like him well enough, but let’s just say he could make my life a little easier if he wanted to.’
Scott nodded. ‘That stings quite a lot,’ he said, gesturing towards his elbow, and I eased off the pressure through my right thumb.
‘Wayne’s really into cars,’ I said, ‘so you two should hit it off.’
‘You’re not?’
‘No.’ I laughed. ‘As far as I’m concerned, they’re all the same from the inside. Looking out through the windscreen you see the same as every other driver. Even when a car is bad, it’s good. It still gets you to where you want to go.’
Scott Elias smiled mildly at my assessment.
Of course, nothing of what I told him was actually true. I’d love a flash car. Who wouldn’t? But I wasn’t about to start gushing over his wheels. I did have some dignity.
There was a lull in the conversation and I could hear the faint sound of Ken Bruce’s Pop Master drifting though from the radio in the waiting area.
To be frank, Scott was in fairly good shape for fifty-four. He obviously took care of himself, did some resistance training, as he still had a bulk to his musculature, more typical of a guy in his thirties. His frame –and I refrain from using the term ‘physicality’ here, as it is currently so overused, and I’m not even sure it’s a proper word – his frame evoked vigour. Sure, he had slight inelasticity of the skin and the forward protrusion of the abdomen that comes from being fifty-four. But you would look twice if you were, say, poolside, pretending to read a paperback, and he was to walk past.
‘I’ll put some strapping on this,’ I said, retrieving the five-inch Fixomull from the shelves. ‘It shouldn’t bother you. You can get it wet, but dab it dry afterwards. It’s breathable, so it shouldn’t affect the skin.’
As I laid the tape across his elbow, I sensed Scott surveying me closely. It was quite unnerving, as usually patients were so interested in what I was doing (everyone loves a bandage, after all) that I wasn’t used to it.
‘There’s something about you,’ he murmured softly.
I didn’t look up.
‘You’re very attractive,’ he said.
‘You’re a married man, Scott.’
‘I’m not coming on to you.’
‘Oh, well, that is a relief.’
‘Okay, maybe I am, a bit,’ he said. ‘But not in the way you think.’
‘There is more than one way?’ I said, and I made one loud, final snip with the scissors.
‘What is it about you?’ he asked playfully.
I rolled my eyes and packed away the tape. ‘Move your arm around and see if it feels okay. Check the bandage isn’t nipping your skin at all.’
‘It feels fine.’
‘Put your shirt on then.’
He didn’t move.
‘Since Friday night,’ he said, ‘ever since I—’
I held up my palm. ‘Please don’t.’
‘Hear me out.’
‘No, Scott. This is my place of work. I have other people to see and, while you seem like a perfectly nice bloke, please don’t compromise my position here. It makes things incredibly awkward when men start to—’
&nbs
p; ‘You get this a lot?’ he asked, and suddenly a shadow fell across his face. I could see instantly he was put out.
‘It happens,’ I said quietly.
Truth be told, it did happen quite regularly. And not because I’m some sort of goddess. Far from it. I have the sturdy physique of a lady golfer, straight dark hair and an unremarkable face. But it did happen.
Cast your mind back to that period when every single woman had a girl-crush on Sarah Jessica Parker. Her style, her general flamboyance, bewitched women the world over. At the time, though, men appeared thoroughly perplexed by this. They would scratch their chins, frowning, as if to say, D’you know what? I just can’t see it myself.
Well, I have something akin to that.
I am not good-looking. My body is neither madly sexy, nor neatly packaged, but men do seem drawn to me, for reasons I can’t fathom. Perhaps it’s because I don’t care any more. Perhaps, because of Winston, and all that happened, I exude an attitude of not caring and men are intrigued by that. Who knows?
‘Your shirt, Scott,’ I repeated. ‘I have another patient waiting.’
He slipped off the bed. Pushed an arm through a sleeve and began clenching his fist repeatedly. ‘The elbow feels really good,’ he said. ‘Remarkable, really, after just one session.’
I wiggled my fingers and said, ‘Magic,’ my tone deadpan.
He offered a rueful smile. ‘I’m sorry,’ he said, holding my gaze. ‘I didn’t mean to make you uncomfortable. It was silly of me, and I apologize.’
‘It’s forgotten,’ I said.
I made a few short treatment notes: cross frictions, strapping applied, advised him to use an ice pack and rest his elbow, and while Scott was tidying himself up I straightened my desk. I returned the tape and scissors, moved the stool against the wall so I didn’t trip over it. Then I got on with laying new couch roll along the bed before dragging out my hair band, rearranging my hair into another fast ponytail and fixing a smile upon my face, signalling it was time for Scott to leave.
